May 31, 2015

When my brother and I were growing up, every New Year's morning, we would be given a book by my mom. As happens, as I got older, it was harder to keep up with my tastes, but there were a couple of times where the book I got was spot on. I tried to keep that up with my daughters, but New Year's here is not proceeded by the kind of Christmas that our family had as a kid, so since my mother's passing, I've shifted this to my Mom's birthday. Unfortunately, my daughters are reading both Japanese and English and it is almost impossible to get a bead on what they would like, so I've gone with tosho-ken, these book certificates that you can get at almost any book store.

I'm wondering if there are any other family rituals like this floating around the commentariat.

May 28, 2015

I gave up trying to read the Rabid Puppy[1] nominations in the Hugo Awards story and (hawk, spit) Related Works categories, and went over to look at the two art categories: Best Professional Artist, and Best Fan Artist.

May 27, 2015

Swiss authorities conducted an extraordinary early-morning operation here Wednesday to arrest several top soccer officials and extradite them to the United States on federal corruption charges.

As leaders of FIFA, soccer’s global governing body, gathered for their annual meeting, more than a dozen plain-clothed Swiss law enforcement officials arrived unannounced at the Baur au Lac hotel, an elegant five-star property with views of the Alps and Lake Zurich. They went to the front desk to get keys and proceeded upstairs to the rooms.

May 26, 2015

Today teh SCOTUS granted cert in a case that may address the question of how to measure when the Constitutional standard of "one person, one vote" for drawing Congressional districts is satisfied. (some SCOTUSblog coverage here)

The "one person, one vote" standard stems from Reynolds v. Sims, striking down unequally populated Congressional districts in...Alabama (surprise!). But the Court did not state what the proper measure should be, rather just that it be reasonable. Thus, as SCOTUSblog notes:

The usual choice considered by legislatures is to make districts more or less equal by dividing up shares of the state’s total population, or, as an alternative, to draw lines based upon some measure of the voting members of the population — such as the numbers actually registered to vote.

The new case argues that if a State draws districts based on population, but that results in a sufficient disparity in terms of voting age population (or perhaps registered or even eligible voters), then population cannot be used. For example, if if 80% of District A's votersresidents were 18 years old or older, but only 60% of District B's votersresidents were of that age, those district boundaries would be unconstitutional because the voting power of those in District A is less than those in District B.

Or, say, if 50% of District A's population is made up of "eligible voters" and only 35% of District B - say because the latter has a large population of undocumented immigrants - then this is equally unconstitutional.

So, you can see where this may be going. Unsurprisingly, behind this litigation, is "The Project on Fair Representation is funding the lawsuit filed by two Texas residents. The group opposes racial and ethnic classifications and has been behind Supreme Court challenges to affirmative action and the federal Voting Rights Act."

Not that that makes their legal argument any less persuasive. In fact, it does seem kind of unfair if my district has 300,000 eligible voters and the next district over only has 200,000, even if the population of each is the same. On the other hand, I'm not sure drawing districts based on "eligible" voters or voting age population is any fairer, since both criteria can and will change over time. Population at least seems less susceptible to manipulation.

But I guess we'll find out sometime between now and June 2016, hooray!

Update: Just to note that this challenge is to state legislative districts, not Congressional ones, but I'm not sure it wouldn't apply to the latter.

If you're thinking that was written by stalwart Democratic partisan, you can be forgiven; but you are flat wrong. Bruce Bartlett is a veteran of the Reagan and Bush-41 administrations. It appears he may have moved beyond the GOP, but only as far as "independent". A Democratic partisan he simply is not.

What makes his paper fascinating is that his conclusion (above) applies even after controlling for party membership, political ideology, etc. That is, you can be a staunch Republican, but if you do not follow Fox News, you will know a lot more about what is really happening in the world than if you do follow it. Somehow, it seems to me like something that would make it hard to come up with, and sell to your supporters, policies which will actually work.

Here's your chance to come up with ways for a political party to florish, even when your most motivated base followers are more ignorant than those who know nothing. That is, they know a lot of stuff that just is not, objectively, true. Feel free to offer up examples of any party and any ideology -- whether they turned out to work well when tried, and under what constraints (e.g. enforced information isolation).

May 19, 2015

by liberal japonicus
The title is a shout out to Oscar Wilde, who wrote "The whole of Japan is a pure invention. There is no such country, there are no such people." This article "Is Japan becoming extinct?" may prove him right. Two grafs:

After years of paying limited attention to academic and media warnings about the declining birthrate, aging population and complaints from the rest of the country about the overconcentration of people and resources in Tokyo, political and corporate leaders in Japan were jolted by the conclusions of a 2014 book by Hiroya Masuda, a former Iwate prefectural governor and head of a government committee on local revitalization.

“Local Extinctions,” Masuda’s detailed report of population changes, used the latest official figures from the government’s National Institution of Population and Social Security Research to show that 896 cities, towns and villages throughout Japan were facing extinction by 2040. At first glance, the book simply repeated what earlier reports had concluded. However, it also included the percentages by which child-bearing women between the ages of 20 and 40 were expected to decline in each and every city, town and village.

Unfortunately, the idea of immigration is really an anathema to Japanese policy makers and, possibly, the Japanese themselves.

These figures about abandoned housing are interesting

In a 2013 survey by the internal affairs ministry, it was discovered that 8.2 million of the more than 60 million homes nationwide were empty. This figure, however, comprises all homes empty at the time of the survey, including those that were on the property market.

The ministry estimated almost 40 percent of 8.2 million empty homes were not being offered for sale or rent. This has created a number of concerns about safety. As long as the homes were maintained by, for example, the heirs of the property, there was no problem. However, abandoned homes left to rot pose fire hazards and other dangers.

By prefecture, Kagoshima has the highest number of abandoned homes with no prospect of being occupied (11 percent of the total number of all homes, occupied or not), while the figure for Kochi is 10.6 percent. Many homes in Kagoshima are located on small, offshore islands that are rapidly going extinct (including Gunkanjima, which hopes to become a World Heritage site).

May 18, 2015

Ugh, we're at the point in the kitchen-design process where we have to pick appliances. We need a new fridge, probably a bottom-freezer, a dual-fuel range (stove-top+oven), and a dishwasher.

Our kitchen designer doesn't do appliances much, she hands you off to an agent she works with at one of the two good local independent appliance stores. I spent like an hour and a half talking to him, and he's sent me two groups of suggestions: one set of Jenn-Air appliances, and one set of GE Cafe Series appliances. I guess you get better prices when you buy them as a set?

Anyway, when I compare the appliances he's showing me to the ones that get high ratings from Consumer Reports, there's not a whole heck of a lot of overlap. Partly that's because the independent appliance guy doesn't handle Kenmore, and not much Kitchenaid or LG. So for them I'd have to go to Sears, and/or put together my own package.

Basically, arrgh. I *hate* making decisions. Talk to me of your experiences with appliance-buying! Which method do you find works best: go with a pro, or roll your own? If you were going to buy a matching set of fridge+dishwasher+range, which brand would you buy?

May 15, 2015

Last week, before I went on my road trip, the ongoing Hugo Awards wank led to the single most surreal conversation of my internet career -- which goes back to about 1990, years before the World Wide Web even existed, so that's a *lot* of surreality.

Background: Juliette Wade's story "Mind Locker" was on the Sad Puppies 3 slate when Brad Torgersen first announced it, but she quickly asked for her story to be removed, and it was. There've been all kinds of rumors about how she got on the slate and why she wanted off.

Summary: Wade recounted how she was asked to be on the slate and why she withdrew. Torgersen commented that she did so because she was afraid of SJWs, and explained that this was a widespread problem. Wade said he was putting words in her mouth, and never to do so again. She reiterated that she withdrew because she was angry with him. Torgersen said he was sad and hurt by her reaction. Even when asked repeatedly, neither Torgersen nor his supporters in the conversation ever acknowledged that he'd put words in Wade's mouth, much less apologized for it.

The surreality was seeing Torgersen re-write someone's motives to their face, while people were watching. It's always difficult to get a real sense of social atmosphere over the internet, but it seemed to me that I was watching Torgersen's reputation sink before my eyes, in real time. It certainly happened for me.

This is the cover of the Signet edition, published in 1959. Notice how it promotes the book as "prize-winning" -- even though the Hugos had no track record at all when The Demolished Man won the very first Best Novel award.

May 14, 2015

Synergy can be defined as the interaction of two inputs to produce a greater impact than either alone. Or, to put it another way, as two phenomena which reinforce each other.

Earlier this week, there was a Conversation on Poverty panel discussion at Georgetown University. It included religious leaders, who seem to be making a push to make the problems of poverty back into the kind of moral issue that they were in the past. (At least joining abortion and gay rights as one of their publicly raised moral concerns.) It included liberal and conservative thinkers. Rather uniquely for a panel discussion, it included the President of the United States (as a rule, Presidents don't do panels).

There were lots of questions addressed. For example, we know there is a correlation between broken families and poverty. The question, for those who want to do something about poverty, is which way does causality run. Unfortunately, there was no clear answer to the question: should family difficulties be seen primarily as a cause of poverty, or are they an effect of poverty itself?

The obvious (at least to me) answer is: Yes -- causality runs both ways. Broken families both make it hard to lift the family out of poverty and hard to give the children the foundation they need to do better than their parents did economically. The income from a single, low wage, job is going to leave a family in poverty; it's just that simple. A single parent, trying to work two jobs to get by is not going to have the time (never mind the energy) to devote to raising children with much success; it's just that simple.

But poverty also contributes to breaking families. If the income from a low wage job is too little to support one individual, there's actually an economic incentive to cut that individual loose and go on as a single parent; it's just that simple. Not to mention that, if one of the parents is unable to find even a low wage job, it's hard to maintain the kind of self-respect that helps keep someone able to deal kindly with others. Which leads to the kind of fighting which breaks up marriages -- at any income level.

So, if you want to address the problem of poverty (those who don't think we should "address" it are given a pass from the discussion), you are going to have to address both sides of the problem simultaneously. You are going to have to figure out how to get families with children enough income to allow them to work only one job (each) and still keep a roof over their head and food on the table. And you are going to have to figure out how to keep families together through the hard times -- starting with stigmatizing, once again, a man (married or not) who begets children and then walks away. Which, as a matter of symmetry, will probably include making unwed motherhood, if not the disaster it was in the middle of the 20th century, at least something far more discouraged than it is today.